● 03.24.15

● Links 24/3/2015: WebKitGTK+ 2.8.0, Black Lab Linux 6.5

Posted in News Roundup at 10:57 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Professionals with Linux skills are in greater demand than ever, according to a recent survey-based report from Dice.com and the Linux Foundation. Nearly all hiring managers surveyed plan to bring on more Linux talent this year, and many of them said they will be hiring in greater numbers than they did last year to cover Linux-supported functions. The vast majority said it’s difficult to fill these positions, and, as a result, many are offering special work arrangements and/or compensation to land Linux professionals. In fact, to fill these needs, many of the organizations surveyed are willing to pay for at least some of the cost of certification training. “Demand for Linux talent continues apace, and it’s becoming more important for employers to be able to verify that candidates have the skill sets they need,” says Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation. “Formal training and certifications are a key way of identifying qualified talent.” More than 1,000 hiring managers and 3,400 Linux professionals took part in the research.

Desktop

• I know that I just posted a fairly long rant about Windows Update last week, and I don’t want this to turn into a blog called “Jamie’s Mostly ‘I Hate Windows’ Stuff”, so I am going to make this quite short and to the point. But I think it is important to post it, because it looks like I have experienced a problem that might specifically target people who are likely to read a blog such as mine.

• First, this problem affects my Lenovo T400 laptop, which I use with a docking station on my desk at home, and which is loaded with Windows 7 Professional 64-bit and a variety of Linux distributions. It is not Windows 8, it is not UEFI boot, and it is not a GPT partitioned disk – it is a ‘plain vanilla’ (bog standard? could be appropriate for Windows…) Windows 7 MBR system.

• There has been a lot of good news in the web-stats of GNU/Linux this year. It’s become clear to me, despite what others write, that the Year Of The GNU/Linux Desktop can happen and it is happening this year.

• arstechnica.com broke the news Friday that Windows 10 will “make the Secure Boot alt-OS lock out a reality” for Linux and other alternative operating systems. If not actual “lock out,” then Windows 10 could making installing an alt-OS a big fat headache for developers and users trying to install them. Elsewhere, Richard Stallman talked Net Neutrality and systemd.

• Some of my recent articles have been about the Linux philosophy and its impact on the daily activities of system administrators like myself. One of the basic tenets of the Linux philosophy is to use software leverage, and one of the important corollaries of that tenet is to automate everything.

• It was 2010 when the first 600 Linux laptops began rolling out to classrooms in our seven elementary school buildings. We knew we had to think differently about device and patch management. There would be some commonality between elements of our elementary classroom systems, the default XFCE desktop environment, for example. But my team and I also wrestled with techniques to better support instructional technology requirements that varied widely by grade level.

Server

• CBR asks Adam Jollans, the firm’s director for Linux and open source strategy, for his views on several topics including security, and where IBM is heading with open source in 2015.

Kernel Space

• The BPF In-Kernel Virtual Machine will likely see new functionality with the next Linux kernel release cycle, Linux 4.1.

• A new patch series led by Alexei Starovoitov appears about ready as new tracing code that allows for eBPF programs to be attached to KProbes. Alexei mentioned in his latest tracing patch series that this eBPF code for kprobes appears ready, “I think it’s good to go.”

• The Linux 4.1 kernel will feature support for Radeon DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport so that this open-source AMD Linux graphics driver can work with the latest high resolution DP displays and modern laptop docking stations.

• The HDMI CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) framework for the Linux kernel has been revived after being stalled in development for quite some time.

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced that Cirrus Logic, Treasure Data, and Xilinx are joining the organization.

Graphics Stack

• The X.Org Foundation elections have finally got underway after being delayed to vote on new directors as well as having the X.Org members decide whether the foundation should dissolve its 501(c)3 status and become a sub-project of the SPI Inc.

• Timothy Arceri has moved on to working towards finishing up work on the ARB_arrays_of_arrays extension as needed by OpenGL 4.3.

• Back in 2013 was when Arceri started working on this arrays-of-arrays support and crowd-funding backed some of the work. He submitted some support while now he’s gone back to finish up more of the ARB_arrays_of_arrays enablement.

Applications

• After a long period of silence I’m coming with a news: Telepathy-Morse project is “still alive” and the first release is going on.

• Now I’m back to Linux on the Desktop for my dayjob, I was slightly nervous about checking out the state of the art for Linux music players; an area I’ve never felt the Linux desktop was very strong on.

• Following the overview of KDE IRC clients, here is a brief overview of several counterparts for GNOME, which will blend well in Xfce or Unity as well.

• The popular GParted application, an open-source disk utility used in numerous Linux kernel-based operating systems for partitioning disk drives, as well as to resize and merge partitions on any disk drive, has reached today, March 23, version 0.22.0.

Proprietary

• NitroShare is a tool that can be used to easily transfer files between computers on your local network, available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• Linux is more capable than ever. With over 1000 Linux games available on Steam and a general shift towards more web-based desktop software, there’s less need for Windows than ever. After all, you can now watch Netflix on Linux without any hacks, and you can even use Microsoft Office on Linux—a web-based version of it, at least.

• But, as most dedicated Linux desktop users will eventually discover, there comes a time when you just need to run a particular piece of Windows software on your Linux PC. There are quite a few ways to do so. Here’s what you need to know.

Games

• Red Eclipse is a free, open-source first-person shooter based upon the Cube 2 engine, with both single-player and multi-player support. It’s a fantasy shooter that bundles a very large number of maps and comes with modes such as DM, CTF or Defend and Control. For some reason, the game always gives me a feeling of calm, and the music theme is really great. So let’s take a brief look at this new version.

• Radium was released for Windows on Desura last year. After getting greenlit for Steam earlier this month with a promise of a Linux version, it made its Linux début on Steam shortly after.

• Warlocks vs Shadows is an action RPG/brawler game set in a fantasy world invaded by shadow monsters. I’ve followed it since Kickstarter, and it looks great!

• I promised I wouldn’t hold out too many roguelike games unless they could show off something unusual, either thematic or mechanic. The *angbands from a week ago were all viable games, but either didn’t bring anything new to the table, or just didn’t quite satisfy.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The Xfce desktop environment sees its first point release today, March 23. While there’s no official announcement on the project’s website at the moment of writing this article, we can tell you that this is a bugfix release addressing some of the issues from Xfce 4.12.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• This is an interesting transitional period in the Qt world for desktop applications. We are in the phase where QML is becoming better and better for the use in a Desktop context, even for full fledged applications.

• Several days ago, I talked about how Plasma 5 is awesome, and how it’s the cure to all worries in this world, particularly those related to aesthetics, functionality and desktops. All fanboyism aside, Plasma shapes up to become a modern and relevant Linux desktop environment, with an intelligent sense of order and efficiency.

• So I’ve shown you a whole bunch of cool things, how about some more? In this guide, I will reveal a few hacks that can make you happier and more productive with Plasma. Sure, you can explore on your own, and experienced users probably won’t find this piece remarkable, but for new users and fresh Windows converts, this article is like someone holding your hand during your first trip to Tijuana.

• Martin Gräßlin has shared some of his recently-landed work for the KWin 5.3 development cycle as it largely pertains to Wayland.

• Last week I merged in a few important changes for the upcoming KWin 5.3 release. The rootless Xwayland support is integrated, which means we are a huge step closer to managing Wayland clients. Rendering, input and cursor is already using the Wayland code paths and will be shared with proper Wayland clients. I have already started working on code for that and have it working quite nicely already but decided to delay the integration for Plasma 5.4.

• Cutelyst the Qt/C++ web framework just got a new release, 0.7.0 is brings many improvements, bugfixes and features.

• Most notably of the changes is a shinny new Chained dispatcher that finally got implemented, with it Cutelyst Tutorial got finished, and a new command line tool to bootstrap new projects.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• We’ve announced last week that the development cycle of the highly anticipated GNOME 3.16 desktop environment ended with the Release Candidate (RC) version, which was made available for testing to users worldwide on March 18, 2015.

• The GNOME development team, through Matthias Clasen, has the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of GTK+ 3.16.0, a powerful, open-source and cross-platform toolkit used in the GNOME 3.16 desktop environment for creating graphical user interfaces.

• It’s GNOME 3.16 week! Matthias Clasen checked in the important GTK+ 3.16.0 package prior to the deadline tonight.

• We are excited and proud of announcing WebKitGTK+ 2.8.0, your favorite web rendering engine, now faster, even more stable and with a bunch of new features and improvements.

• The Mutter 3.16.0 and GNOME Shell 3.16.0 releases don’t explicitly bring any big changes over the earlier 3.15.x releases, but for these updated key GNOME 3 components there are some big changes compared to GNOME 3.14.

• Shotwell, the open-source software that is used as the default photo viewer and organizer utility in numerous distributions of GNU/Linux, including Ubuntu, has reached version 0.22.0 on March 23, ahead of the GNOME 3.16 announcement on March 25, bringing assorted new features and fixes.

• Carlos Garcia Campos of Igalia has a good write-up about changes for the GNOME version of the WebKit rendering engine for the GNOME 3.16 cycle.

• One of the major visual updates of the 3.16 release is the high contrast accessible theme. Both the shell and the toolkit have received attention in the HC department. One noteworthy aspect of the theme is the icons. To guarantee some decent amount of contrast of an icon against any background, back in GNOME 2 days, we solved it by “double stroking” every shape. The term double stroke comes from a special case, when a shape that was open, having only an outline, would get an additional inverted color outline. Most of the time it was a white outline of a black silhouette though.

• The release of the GNOME 3.16 desktop environment is imminent, so package maintainers are still updating their GNOME apps these days in preparation for tomorrow’s big announcement.

Distributions

Reviews

• Bodhi Linux is a Ubuntu-based distribution featuring the Enlightenment desktop environment. Bodhi focuses on minimalism and its small collection of default software, combined with the lightweight Enlightenment desktop, allow the distribution to run on older and low-specification hardware. Last year Bodhi’s lead developer, Jeff Hoogland, left the project for several months and Bodhi development slowed. However, Mr Hoogland returned to the project earlier this year and the pace of development picked up, leading to the release of Bodhi Linux 3.0.0

New Releases

• The Black Lab Software team, through Roberto J. Dohnert, had the pleasure of announcing earlier today, March 24, the immediate availability for download of all four editions of Black Lab Linux 6.5, which includes Xfce 4.12, KDE 4.14.2, MATE 1.8.1, and GNOME 3.10.2 desktop environments.

• The antiX 14.4 MX Linux operating system has been announced, based on the Debian GNU/Linux 7 (Wheezy) distribution and built around the lightweight and popular Xfce 4.12 desktop environment. This is a stable release that uses the sysVinit init system by default and updates several core components and applications.

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

• We look at Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) a company in the Technology industry getting a lot of share market attention at present, to assess if it provides value for investors considering buying or selling it. Currently Red Hat, Inc. is trading at $69.50 after moving up 0.46% in the previous day of trading.

• Throughout the world, businesses have already moved to smaller, more mobile, more tactile screens as their means of interacting with critical business information. Cloud dynamics has made it easier for server-based applications to reach these people on their new devices.

Fedora

• I wanted to do this review a few weeks ago but didn’t get the chance until now. Anyway, although I have reviewed Korora a few times before on this blog, I have not reviewed its Cinnamon edition until now. I particularly wanted to try the Cinnamon edition mainly because I seem to have bad luck whenever I try other distributions with Cinnamon, so I wanted to see if that would change here. As usual, I tried it as a live USB system made with UnetBootin. Follow the jump to see what it’s like.

• Fedora 22 Alpha has been released by Fedora Project, it now available to download and install for test drive. The Alpha version of Fedora 22 GNOME edition comes with many enhancements from the GNOME 3.16 Beta desktop environment, such as the revamped GNOME Shell theme, GNOME 3.16’s brand-new notification system that is integrated beside calendar applet, Nautilus improvements, and many other goodies.

• I’m excited to tell you about another* new addition to the Fedora Engineering team. In mid-April, Laura Abbott joins our kernel team. She comes to us most recently from Qualcomm. Her projects there included memory management and debugging support. She’s also a regular contributor to the Linux kernel upstream. Laura will work with Josh Boyer and Justin Forbes on projects relating to both the upstream and Fedora kernel. We’re happy to have Laura joining our team soon. Please help us extend her a warm welcome.

• Diversity is a hot topic in open source right now, and it has inspired some passionate exchanges between Linux users in various discussion threads online. The Fedora Project has jumped on the diversity bandwagon is now seeking a Diversity Advisor.

• One of my job requirement is to keep testing the latest Fedora cloud images. We have a list of tests from Fedora QA team.

Debian Family

• While I occasionally upgrade the packaging of the software I maintain at Debian to keep up with best practices, my activity downsizing goes on. Simply put: I never had any ambition to become a Debian Developer. My involvement has always remained pragmatic and mostly from the perspective of packaging software that I found useful. Even then, my motivation for doing that keeps on dwindling into nothingness, because key pieces of software keep on breaking, whenever someone upstream decides to reinvent the wheel.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu security isn’t difficult: Hardening your Ubuntu installation is usually a straight forward process. Yet sometimes in our haste, we forget to address important security measures early on. In this article I’ll share my essential Ubuntu security hardening techniques.

• The Acer Aspire Switch 11 is a 2-in-1 tablet which ships with Windows 8.1 software. But that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with Windows.

• Canonical, through John Johansen, has announced earlier today, March 24, that new kernel updates are available for its Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn), Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating systems.

Flavours and Variants

• Wrishiraj Kaushik had the pleasure of announcing today, March 23, the immediate availability for download of the final release of his awesome SuperX 3.0 Linux operating system for computers. This major version includes a great number of features, updated applications, new artwork, and lots of under the hood improvements.

• At the request of numerous “angry” Ubuntu MATE fans, Martin Wimpress announced a few minutes ago, March 23, the immediate availability for download of the second maintenance release of the Ubuntu MATE 14.04 LTS (Long Term Support) operating system.

Devices/Embedded

• AndersDX unveiled a panel computer based on a Sitara AM3354 SoC, with WiFi and BT, and a 5.7-inch, VGA resistive or 4.3-inch, WVGA capacitive touch display.

• Wind River updated its embedded Linux virtualization, security, and Carrier Grade profiles with Yocto Linux 1.7, citing key benefits to IoT applications.

• Gumstix has updated its wireless enabled, Linux-oriented Overo Storm modules with new “Storm-Y” models that add WiFi access point and BLE 4.1 functions.

• The new TV features a 40-inch full HD LED panel by Sharp with 5000:1 contrast ratio, a Cortex-A9 quad-core 1.45GHz CPU, 1.5GB of RAM, 8GB of flash storage and a MIUI TV Android-based OS. In terms of playback, it offers H.265 10-bit hardware decoding, allowing you watch H.265, H.264, MPEG4, and REAL, as well as other mainstream video formats like RM, FLV, MOV, AVI, MKV, TS and MP4. Xiaomiappears to be playing up its gaming credentials, too, and boasts that it measures just 14.5 millimeters front-to-back at its thinnest. It appears to be available with a range of bright rear casings, too, that my help you jolly up your pad.

Phones

Android

• The three compatible systems have MSRP prices ranging from high to somewhat reasonable—but all still cost far less than a new car! The top-of-the-line AVIC-8100NEX, with a capacitive touchscreen, costs $1,400. You can save a couple of C-notes by opting for the $1,200 AVIC-7100NEX (with its inferior resistive touchscreen). The most affordable model is the AVIC-4100NEX, for $700.

• Looking for a job? LinkedIn is a great place to start making new connections and finding new opportunities, and its new job search app can help. The company launched the LinkedIn Job Search app for Android, giving job seekers an easier way to find their next gig using the professional social network.

• Motorola is known for being pretty quick with its Android OS updates lately, and it looks like that’s going to continue with Android 5.1.

• Even though some Android device makers have already rolled out devices with embedded fingerprint sensors that offer users added security features, Google has yet to make it a core security feature for Android. But Google is still working on its own interesting solutions for temporarily killing the need for a PIN on smartphones, as the company has just added new functionality to Android 5.0 Lollipop that’s not only cool, but also very useful.

• Two weeks ago, Google announced the start of its Android 5.1 Lollipop update for Nexus devices. In that two weeks, we’ve seen a number of new details emerge for owners of the Nexus 5, Nexus 6 and others and today we want to take a look at the important things to know now about the Android 5.1 Lollipop update and its release for Nexus users.

• When Google unveiled Android back in 2007, it was an OEM’s dream come true — Google wouldn’t charge any licensing fees to use the bare-bones version of it and OEMs could customize it to their hearts’ desires. Android Wear, on the other hand, is another beast entirely and OEMs are showing significantly less enthusiasm for it than they did with the original Android.

• Android 5.1 is rolling out, boasting a number of new features and improvements over Android 5.0.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• A couple of weeks ago, in a shadowy corner of a fancy coffee house in London, I was handed a rather interesting gadget: a white, nondescript 9.7-inch tablet. I tapped the power button, and the Firefox OS lock screen appeared. That wasn’t the surprising bit, though. Rather unusually, there was a MIPS-based CPU inside the device.

Free Software/Open Source

• A two-year project inside Facebook has culminated in the release of software to test how well applications and servers work under degraded network conditions – all the way down to rickety 2G.

• The idea behind Augmented Traffic Control, open-sourced on GitHub, is to improve the delivery of material on under-performing networks.

• The creation of an open source computing system users control via voice command could generate new opportunities for service providers seeking to differentiate their offerings or develop new custom solutions.

• At Freedom of the Press Foundation, we’re excited to announce the release of a brand new version of SecureDrop, our open source whistleblower system which media organizations can use to communicate and receive documents from sources.

• Version 0.3 has been over a year in the making, and is the result of extensive feedback from both news organizations who already have SecureDrop—like the New Yorker and The Intercept—and from a security audit done by iSec Partners. In addition, we have a new website for SecureDrop, SecureDrop.org, which will serve as a hub for all the news organizations that have installed their own instances, and where you can find all the information you need to use it yourself.

• Facebook today open-sourced Augmented Traffic Control (ATC), a Wi-Fi tool for testing how mobile phones and their apps handle networks of varying strength, over on GitHub. ATC simulates 2G, Edge, 3G, and LTE networks, and allows engineers to switch quickly between various simulated network connections.

• Today, the open source model is much better understood, and organisations are considering it as vital to the future of digital business and government services. A recent survey found that more than 50% of respondents are moving into the open source space.

Events

• EuroBSDcon is the European technical conference for users and developers of BSD-based systems. The conference will take place in Stockholm, Sweden. Tutorials will be held on Thursday and Friday in the main conference hotel, while the shorter talks and papers program is on Saturday and Sunday in the University of Stockholm.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla announced the updated release this week of their NSS (Network Security Services) libraries.

• Firefox 36.0.4 has been released. This update includes security and bug fixes, support for the full HTTP/2 protocol, and more. The release notes contain the details.

SaaS/Big Data

• The OpenStack project feels different from other open source projects to me. Let me try to explain.

CMS

• Nearly six months have passed since a major Drupal SQL injection vulnerability was disclosed, and yet attackers are continuing to try, sometimes successfully, to exploit websites that have failed to update their systems.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The world of free software seems constantly fresh and exciting, so it always comes as a shock – to me, at least – to remember that it has been around for more than 30 years now. Richard Stallman announced the GNU project back in 1983, but this month, there’s another important anniversary: the publication of the GNU Manifesto.

• Richard Stallman, a 27-year-old programmer at the time with MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, wanted to modify the software that drove the new Xerox 9700 laser printer to get it to send out an electronic alert over the network every time the paper jammed so that somebody could walk over to it and fix the problem. When he was denied access to the source code, Stallman recalls, this set him thinking about how software should be shared freely so that users could modify it to suit their needs.

• According to Richard Stallman, godfather of the free software movement, Facebook is a “monstrous surveillance engine,” tech companies working for patent reform aren’t going nearly far enough, and parents must lobby their children’s schools to keep data private and provide free software alternatives.

• The free software guru touched on a host of topics in his keynote Saturday at the LibrePlanet conference, a Free Software Foundation gathering at the Scala Center at MIT. Excoriating a “plutocratic” corporate culture and warning of severe threats to freedom and privacy around the world, he nevertheless said his own positions on the technology issues of the day had evolved.

• Richard Stallman recently revived a nearly year-old thread in the emacs-devel mailing list, but the underlying issue has been around a lot longer than that. It took many years before the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) changed its runtime library exemption in a way that allowed for GCC plugins, largely because of fears that companies might distribute proprietary, closed-source plugins. But efforts to use the plugin API to add features to another GNU project mainstay, Emacs, seem to be running aground on that same fear—though there has never been any real evidence that there is much interest in circumventing the runtime library exception to provide proprietary backends to GCC.

• GNU Nano 2.4.0 was released this morning as the first stable update to this open-source CLI text editor in a number of years.

• Ken Starks put another well deserved feather in his cap on Saturday when he accepted an award for Reglue from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) at the LibrePlanet conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Saturday. Reglue was announced as this year’s winner of the Project of Social Benefit Award by FSF executive director John Sullivan, who also announced that Sébastien Jodogne had won this year’s award for Advancement of Free Software. The event took place on the MIT campus.

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• The White House has plucked 28-year-old David Recordon, engineering director at Facebook, as its first IT Director. A strong open source advocate with a decidedly non-button-down appearance, Recordon will be charged with modernizing the White House’s technology. Here’s a closer look at one of our newest public servants…

• Patricia M. Loui-Smicker of Hawaii was confirmed by the Senate, just the other day, as a director of the Export-Import bank. Not the kind of routine confirmation that makes the news. Gilberto de Jesus of Maryland withdrew his nomination to be chief counsel for advocacy at the Small Business Administration. The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs reported favorably on a bill “to reduce the operation and maintenance costs associated with the Federal fleet by encouraging use of remanufactured parts.”

Openness/Sharing

• Apple’s website defines it as “an open source software framework that makes it easy for researchers and developers to create apps that could revolutionize medical studies, potentially transforming medicine forever.”

• In total, 29 countries have submitted their second Open Government Partnership (OGP) Action Plans in 2014, according to the 2014 report of the Open Government Partnership. This number indicates “a strong desire to continue participating in OGP”, the report said. The report also mentions that seven countries submitted their first national Action Plan last year. In total, 36 countries “submitted new Action Plans containing over 900 commitments“.

• People eager to share personal information beyond what’s on their Facebook profile have another outlet: an online platform launching on Tuesday will let them give scientists information about their genomes, gut bacteria and other biological data.

Open Hardware

• Plugins for both Unity 5 and Unreal Engine 4 have been released to the public for OSVR, the Open Source Virtual Reality program. This system was first initiated by the folks at Razer, appearing at CES 2015 with a brand new OSVR Dev Kit virtual reality headset. In the very short time between then and now, they’ve racked up quite a few heavy-hitting partners. This system also works with Vuzix technology and has racked up partners like Ubisoft, Seven Hill Games, Homido, and castAR.

Programming

• New Zealand. A recent survey of software languages has revealed that every single one of them is sick to the back teeth of Python telling them it’s better than everything else for everything.

Leftovers

Science

• Engineering genius Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs, has warned that artificially intelligent computers will take over from humans and that the future is “scary and very bad for people”

Health/Nutrition

• The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has deemed genetically modified (GM), non-browning “Arctic” apples—approved last month by the Department of Agriculture—and bruise-resistant “Innate” potatoes “as safe and nutritious as their conventional counterparts,” according to The New York Times.

• Okanagan Specialty Fruits, the British Columbia-based firm that produces the GM apples, and J.R. Simplot of Idaho, which grows the GM potatoes, both consulted with the FDA to assess the safety and nutrition of their foods.

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• “In order to survive and preserve its leading role on the international stage, the US desperately needs to plunge Eurasia into chaos, (and) to cut economic ties between Europe and Asia-Pacific Region … Russia is the only (country) within this potential zone of instability that is capable of resistance. It is the only state that is ready to confront the Americans. Undermining Russia’s political will for resistance… is a vitally important task for America.”

• Israel supported the Palestinian Islamic organization Hamas’s growth in order to drive a wedge in the Palestinian resistance movement, according to WikiLeaks creator Julian Assange.

Transparency Reporting

• What? Western Persecution. Where? United Nationals Human Rights Council Meeting, Geneva. Why? ‘The increasing attacks on Western whistleblowers, journalists and publishers pose a threat to democracy and human rights.’

• Suspects should have the same right to anonymity as the complainant in sexual offences, until the time that they are charged.

• If you’re a UK-based journalist who’s reported on the Snowden leaks, it’s safe to say you’re under investigation. Not only are you being investigated, but that investigation itself is so secret, it can’t be discussed. The Intercept’s Ryan Gallagher sent a Freedom of Information request to London’s Metropolitan Police (the Met) for more information about the investigation — something twice publicly confirmed by Met representatives.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• California is now heading into its fourth year of record-breaking drought, with no liquid relief in sight. High temperatures, little precipitation, and historically low snowpack have left the state with dwindling water reserves. The situation is so bad, as NASA scientist Jay Famiglietti wrote in an LA Times op-ed last week, that California has only a year of water left in its reservoirs.

Finance

• For the time being, the markets remain sanguine, expecting, for example, a gentle increase in the Bank of England’s main interest rate to just 1.5pc by the end of the decade. And, who knows, maybe the markets are right.

• But maybe it’s too quiet. Last week, Ray Dalio, the founder of the $165bn (£110bn) hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, wrote a widely-circulated note warning his clients that the US Federal Reserve risked setting off a 1937-style crash when it starts raising interest rates again.

• Two Mondays ago, Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin and a fast-rising Republican star, signed a “right-to-work” bill into law in his state, calling it “one more tool that will help grow good-paying, family-supporting jobs here in the state of Wisconsin.”

• In fact, if experience from other right-to-work states is any indicator, it’s likely to do just the opposite. It may, indeed, attract more jobs, but most of them won’t pay enough to support a family.

• The decline of America’s middle class in the past four decades is attributable to many factors, one of them being the decline in union membership; right-to-work depresses union membership further. It will decrease dues payments that unions tend to spend on candidates who support unions, most of whom are not Republicans.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• BP announced Monday that it was cutting ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council, the controversial corporate bill mill. It is the third major fossil fuel company to sever ties with ALEC, after Occidental Petroleum in 2014. ExxonMobil remains on the ALEC private sector board.

• “We continually assess our engagements with policy and advocacy organizations and based on our most recent assessment, we have determined that we can effectively pursue policy matters of current interest to BP without renewing our membership in ALEC,” the spokesman told the National Review.

Privacy

• Top-secret documents obtained by the CBC show Canada’s electronic spy agency has developed a vast arsenal of cyberwarfare tools alongside its U.S. and British counterparts to hack into computers and phones in many parts of the world, including in friendly trade countries like Mexico and hotspots like the Middle East.

• In the wake of the Snowden leaks, more and more tech companies are providing their users with transparency reports that detail (to the extent they’re allowed) government requests for user data. Amazon — home to vast amounts of cloud storage — isn’t one of them.

• When the Senate Intelligence Committee passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act by a vote of 14 to 1, committee chairman Senator Richard Burr argued that it successfully balanced security and privacy. Fifteen new amendments to the bill, he said, were designed to protect internet users’ personal information while enabling new ways for companies and federal agencies to coordinate responses to cyberattacks. But critics within the security and privacy communities still have two fundamental problems with the legislation: First, they say, the proposed cybersecurity act won’t actually boost security. And second, the “information sharing” it describes sounds more than ever like a backchannel for surveillance.

• Prime Minister John Key believes the latest spying allegations were timed to coincide with his visit to South Korea.

• “Of course they were, it’s all part of a particular agenda by Nicky Hager and some others,” he told reporters in Seoul.

• “There’s no question there’s an anti-government, anti-American agenda.”

• Spying by the GCSB on those competing against National Government minister Tim Groser for the World Trade Organisation’s top job has appalled a former foreign affairs and trade minister and astonished one of the country’s most experienced diplomats.

• An inquiry is likely into the actions of the GCSB after Labour leader Andrew Little said he would ask the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security to investigate today.

• The Herald and US news site the Intercept yesterday revealed a top secret GCSB document showing the electronic surveillance agency had been searching for email communications which mentioned Mr Groser, the Trade Minister, in association with names of candidates competing against him. The news broke as Prime Minister John Key and Mr Groser prepared to sign a Free Trade Agreement in South Korea, whose former trade minister was among the surveillance targets vying for the $700,000 WTO job.

• The NSA has a term for vulnerabilities it think are exclusive to it: NOBUS, for “nobody but us.” Turns out that NOBUS is a flawed concept. As I keep saying: “Today’s top-secret programs become tomorrow’s PhD theses and the next day’s hacker tools.” By continuing to exploit these vulnerabilities rather than fixing them, the NSA is keeping us all vulnerable.

• As if Facebook couldn’t get any bigger, it’s looking like The Social Network wants to start natively hosting content from news organizations. As The New York Times’ sources tell it, Zuckerberg and Co. have been in talks with at least six media companies about publishing their content directly on the site — no link-clicking required. The initial round of publications apparently includes The New York Times, Buzzfeed, National Geographic and our sister publication The Huffington Post. The reason? Websites take too long to load, and Facebook says that on mobile, the average eight-second page-load is too much. Of course, the outfit has a vested interest in mobile, hence it stepping in.

Civil Rights

• One-percent elections. Congressional gridlock. An increasingly demobilized public. Our democracy is on life support

• You don’t hear much about FBI whistleblowers. Many other agencies have had wrongdoing exposed by employees (and the government has often seen fit to slap the whistles out of their mouths with harsh prosecution), but the FBI isn’t one of them. Forty-three years ago, whistleblowers broke into the FBI and retrieved damning documents, but no one’s really broken out of the FBI to do the same. In fact, the FBI would rather not talk about whistleblowing at all.

• The ruling is regarded as a victory for Governor Scott Walker, who championed the law in Wisconsin and has boasted about the state’s voting restrictions as he makes the case for a presidential run. Walker defended voter ID during the 2014 gubernatorial race, declaring that “it doesn’t matter” if there is only one incident of voter fraud in each election, even though as many as 300,000 Wisconsinites don’t have the forms of ID required under the law.

• The assault of global capitalism is not only an economic and political assault. It is a cultural and historical assault. Global capitalism seeks to erase our stories and our histories. Its systems of mass communication, which peddle a fake intimacy with manufactured celebrities and a false sense of belonging within a mercenary consumer culture, shut out our voices, hopes and dreams. Salacious gossip about the elites and entertainers, lurid tales of violence and inane trivia replace in national discourse the actual and the real. The goal is a vast historical amnesia.

• The traditions, rituals and struggles of the poor and workingmen and workingwomen are replaced with the vapid homogenization of mass culture. Life’s complexities are reduced to simplistic stereotypes. Common experiences center around what we have been fed by television and mass media. We become atomized and alienated. Solidarity and empathy are crushed. The cult of the self becomes paramount. And once the cult of the self is supreme we are captives to the corporate monolith.

• As the mass media, now uniformly in the hands of large corporations, turn news into the ridiculous chronicling of pseudo-events and pseudo-controversy we become ever more invisible as individuals. Any reporting of the truth—the truth about what the powerful are doing to us and how we are struggling to endure and retain our dignity and self-respect—would fracture and divide a global population that must be molded into compliant consumers and obedient corporate subjects. This has made journalism, real journalism, subversive. And it has made P. Sainath—who has spent more than two decades making his way from rural Indian village to rural Indian village to make sure the voices of the country’s poor are heard, recorded and honored—one of the most subversive journalists on the subcontinent. He doggedly documented the some 300,000 suicides of desperate Indian farmers—happening for the last 19 years at the rate of one every half hour—in his book “Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories From India’s Poorest Districts.” And in December, after leaving The Hindu newspaper, where he was the rural affairs editor, he created the People’s Archive of Rural India. He works for no pay. He relies on a small army of volunteers. He says his archive deals with “the everyday lives of everyday people.” And, because it is a platform for mixed media, encompassing print, still photographs, audio and film, as well as an online research library, it is a model for those who seek to tell the stories that global capitalism attempts to blot out.

• When some 70 members of the neo-Nazi organization Golden Dawn go on trial sometime this spring, there will be more than street thugs and fascist ideologues in the docket, but a tangled web of influence that is likely to engulf Greece’s police, national security agency, wealthy oligarchs, and mainstream political parties. While Golden Dawn—with its holocaust denial, its swastikas, and Hitler salutes—makes it look like it inhabits the fringe, in fact the organization has roots deep in the heart of Greece’s political culture

• Investigators discovered German coins dating back to World War II in the deserted rubble.

• Ruined buildings in an Argentine nature reserve could have been built as a Nazi hideout, archeologists believe. Investigators found German coins dating back to World War II in the deserted rubble.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• As of April 2014 figures from uSwitch showed, only 15% of Britain is using broadband of 30 Mbps or higher – the speed classified by the EU as “superfast”. Looking inward, compared with the rest of the UK, Wales has some of the slowest Internet speeds. Wales itself contains the slowest broadband speed street in the entire UK, Erw Fawr in Henryd, North Wales had an average download speed of 0.60 megabits per second. That is 30 times slower than the UK national average.

• As we noted a week and a half ago when the FCC released its full net neutrality rules, it seemed like the legal challenges wouldn’t start for a little while — because the rules had to formally be published in the Federal Register, which would then set off the countdown clock for filing a lawsuit against the rules. However, some believe that parts of the new rules fall under a different legal regime, and thus there is a 10 day limit from the date the rules were released to file an appeal. And thus, we have USTelecom, a trade association of broadband providers and Alamo Broadband, a small Texas-based ISP, who have both filed legal challenges over the FCC’s rules. Specifically, they’re both asking appeals courts to “review” the rules. Alamo is asking the Fifth Circuit court of appeals, while USTelecom is focusing on the DC Circuit (which is where the last challenge to FCC rules happened). The reasoning in both is fairly similar.

• A few hours after this was first noticed, the Cruz campaign appears to have removed nigerian-prince.com from its certificate, but it still raises some questions about just who he has hired to build his websites. I guess that’s what happens when even the technologists in your own party openly mock Ted Cruz’s ignorance when it comes to technology issues like net neutrality.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Taylor Swift knew they were trouble. So too did Microsoft. And the pop phenomenon and the software giant both had the means and motive to do something about it.

• From 1 June there will be an unprecedented web free-for-all. In a bid to allow easier searches for doctors, businesses and places, a raft of new top-level domain (TLD) names – the last bit of a web address – will become available to buy, including “.healthcare” and “.deals”, but also “.porn”, “.sucks” and “.adult”.

• Today EU commissioner Malmström gave a speech in the European Parliament trade committee on investor-to-state dispute settlement (ISDS). ISDS gives foreign investors the right to use arbitration against states, instead of using local courts.

• Malmström made clear that she does not want to change the trade agreement with Canada (CETA), which contains a highly controversial ISDS section. The CETA text was used for the ISDS consultation.

Copyrights

• A federal court in New York has issued a paralyzing verdict against the Chinese-based DVD ripping company DVDFab. Ruling in favor of AACS, the licensing outfit founded by Warner Bros, Disney, Microsoft, Intel and others, the court has issued an updated injunction granting the seizure of several domain names belonging to the software vendor.

• A federal judge in New York has ordered dozens of global domains owned by the Chinese company Fengtao Software to be seized, for its social media accounts to be blocked, and for payment processors to cut off their services to the company.

• As TorrentFreak reports, this is the result of legal action by the decryption licensing body AACS, founded by companies such as Microsoft and Walt Disney. Last year AACS won a preliminary injunction against Fengtao Software, which sells the popular DVD-ripping software DVDFab. Initially, Fengtao failed to respond to the court, which caused the injunction to be granted by default. Later, the Chinese company asked for the decision to be reviewed, arguing that the order was too broad because it affected the company globally, while the relevant copyright law applied by the judge was US-specific.

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